PEOPLE’S VOTE COMPATIBLE WITH PEOPLE’S FATE
A democratic alternative to liberal democracy
Glenn Sankatsing
Published in: Political Democracy, Social Democracy and the Market in the Caribbean. Edited by Jack Menke. Paramaribo, Democracy Unit, Faculty of Social Sciences, Anton de Kom University of Suriname, 2004
Caribbean Reality Studies Center
Free distribution with reference to source
“We’re the rightful owners of this country…
Since you can’t govern, give us back the power…
Let us govern!” [1]
Abstract
Power, not by bullet, ballot or wallet, but by representation is the only political rescue option for the troubled societies of contemporary world that can permit genuine democracy and trigger development. Liberal democracy, based on appropriation of power by induced consent, has failed to deliver and is historically exhausted as an option. The joint pursuit of development, representation and development ideology is the only realm for the mobilization of the three critical factors that shape history: social forces, survival and awareness. That is the only alternative to social death for derailing societies, given the imminent external danger of globalization into extinction. The alternative, as is argued out of an assessment of historical experience, is the mobilization of all positive social forces and the moral stock of society, in order to create democratic social and political development movements based on social agency, solidarity and representation, as the democratic alternative to liberal democracy.
The ‘democratic’ appropriation of power is no guarantee for a democratic exercise of rule. Appropriation of power can neither assure a fair allocation of resources in the pursuit of collective interests, nor safeguard the survival of the nation and the future of a polity. Many people in contemporary world, looking back half a century, find this awful truth dominating their history as the main flaw of liberal democracy.[2]
A whole century of evidence corroborates that liberal democracy has not been incompatible with social and economic inequality, with anti-democratic rule, with physical oppression, with partisan distribution of resources and systemic corruption. Universal suffrage and collective suffering went hand in hand. Explosive social disruption and political instability, ethnic conflict and religious confrontation, civil war and separatism, the abortion of development and the truncation of social evolution, those have been the social cost of the structural democratic deficit of the liberal option, most saliently in independent nation states that emerged on three continents in the twentieth century.
These enormous social and human costs of historically aborted development pose critical threats, both nationally and globally, to stability, peace and survival, particularly in the era of neoliberal globalization that has turned the picture before us grimmer. Dooming circumstances of beleaguered societies, without any perspective for stability, peace or development, urge both social science and politics in contemporary world to promptly formulate a feasible alternative for the future. The aim of these reflections on politics, power and governance is to draw the contours of a democratic alternative to liberal democracy, where people's vote is compatible with people's fate.
1. Governance and liberal democracy
The nature and quality of governance and rule always constitute a critical factor for development, stability and survival of a society. Notwithstanding unprecedented advances in science and technology, humanity has been unable to find viable answers to essential matters as social coexistence, ecological survival, justice, peace and governance. The strife of humanity, triggered by the innate drive for survival and self-realization, to benefit from control and manipulation of nature has come to a dead end.
At this point, the most critical flaw in the evolution of humanity is the breach between its intellectual and social development. Unable to control the products of its own intelligence, extraordinary achievements of centuries of science, technology and knowledge could neither secure social development, nor prevent an explosive breach in inequality, injustice and suffering at a global scale, nor restrain intolerance in culture and creed. Revolutionary human incursions in the realm of knowledge and ability rather provoked imminent manmade apocalyptic dangers in the field of ecology, development, social stability and peace. Sophisticated weaponry, war and destruction figure among the most prominent applications of science and technology. The key challenge of humanity facing these multiple man-made threats to survival is, therefore, not technical but social, not to subdue nature but to discipline human race, not the control of matter but the control of man. This casts all footlights on the sphere of governance and on the say of people in the rule over all.
The appropriation of power to govern and rule, by force, conspiracy or elections, has been no guarantee for good governance, social justice or development. That may well be an inherent problem, since any appropriation of power constitutes a paternalist negation of democracy. Historically, democracy has been claimed in the full ideological continuum from universal suffrage systems of capitalist liberal democracy up to the democratic centralism of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Communism, fascism, dictatorship, caudillismo[3] and liberal democracy can be bracketed together for providing bitter episodes of elite provoked derailment, instability and crises all over the globe. The toll paid by peoples and societies suffering from domination, tyranny and despotism at the hand of self-proclaimed or elected vanguards or rulers has been unacceptably high in the twentieth century in East, West, North and South.
In communism - whether in its Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist or Maoist version - an ideological vanguard of intellectuals, rather than the class deemed revolutionary, seizes leadership and command for the cause of the proletariat. An ‘enlightened’ elite, versatile in proletarian ideology, claims to act in their name. The legitimacy of its dictatorship of the proletariat and democratic centralism got a severe blow by the collapse of blocs and walls. Fascism, opportunistically seeking advantages in the troubled waters of deep social crises and despair, was marginalized by historic defeat in big war. Repeatedly, dictatorship and caudillismo, exploiting frustrations and social despair, were overrun with severe tolls of vindicative democratic, human rights and liberation movements, most salient in Latin America, Asia and Africa.
In our days, these failed systems of governance and rule have vanished as a viable option to offer an alternative for the future of troubled societies. Liberal democracy not only gained momentum in a favorable capitalist environment that went global, but now claims universal validity as the only viable system of governance, in the ‘end-of-ideology’ ideology of neo-liberalism.
With other systems on their way to oblivion, liberal democracy has grown into a universally coined system of legalization of governance, power and rule, endorsed by the aggregated votes of citizens. In contemporary world, with the fall of the socialist bloc, liberal democracy based on general elections have become the system of governance that claims exclusive and uncontested universal validity, as a context-free device that can be readily imposed on all societies by argument, persuasion or coercion. In the light of its dramatic failure to respond to the social and political reality of three continents, in the course of the twentieth century, the first issue to address is whether the democratic appropriation of power can constitute a guarantee for a democratic exercise of governance. This draws full attention to the last of the mohicans, liberal democracy. The first task to embark upon, therefore, is the diagnosis of the origin, nature and performance of liberal democracy.
Politics, as the goal-directed mobilization of human assets for actions to administrate the present and shape the future, finds its culmination in the conquest and maintenance of power to govern over a polity. What now is the principle that substantiates the claim of a vanguard or leader to rule over all?
Since ancient times, the origin of power and rule in society, community and social group, whether family, tribe, kingdom or republic, constituted an issue for struggle and dispute among members of the polity and a matter of social concern among thinkers and scholars. Many ideas, concepts and strategies on politics and governance have emerged in a millenary search that dates back to the first state-like structures of Sumer, between the Euphrates and the Tigris. From Greek philosophers and Roman statesmen to Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Marx, Weber, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Gandhi, Martin Luther King up to Nelson Mandela, the single concept that dominated this longstanding debate was ‘legitimacy’. The support for governance, the loyalty to the sovereign, the guarantee for social and political stability, and the conservation of rule, all rotate around the concept of ‘legitimacy’.
Power to govern over all was substantiated by the incarnation of gods, the legacy of prophets, the heir of kings, the liberator from serfdom and the winner of democratic elections. This mix of ethical and practical criteria creates ambiguities that hamper the analysis of the substantiation of rule. Conceptual clarity, therefore, demands a clear distinction between legality, legitimacy and justice.
Legality is understood, here, as lawfulness related to the obedience of formally established or imposed institutions, rules and de facto power constellations, enforceable by coercion and sanction. Legality, therefore, relates to the compliance with laws enforced upon tribe or state, and the capacity to impose rules to sanction defiance. Victory in war, conquest, colonization, revolution, seizure of power, suffrage and even expansionist occupation, whenever successful, determine the reigning legality.
Legitimacy is defined as the degree of acceptance, obedience and support of the leadership by collective and individual social actors in a group, community or society.
Legitimacy is, therefore, not an ethical concept laden with subjectivism, but relates strictly to support for authority, to laws of hearts and minds, to obedience by people and to acceptance of the ruler, whether generated by election, revolution, war, kin or religion. By its very nature, legitimacy is located in the perception and conscience of social actors. In a strict sense, legitimacy is the degree of control of the minds of people, based on an internalized discourse for the claim of leadership.
Justice covers the full scope of the ethical dimension, based on the statement of principles on what is honest, fair, reasonable, respectable and desirable. Justice relates to obedience of morals and gods, and derives from principles and values in religion, philosophy and cosmogony.
With these key concepts defined, an assessment can now be made of the nature and practice of liberal democracy, in the first place focusing on legitimacy, the prime agent to sustain power and rule.
Liberal democracy is individual-endorsed control of governance and rule over all by vested and newborn elites, derived from the mobilization of existing allegiance or from induced consent. It authorizes control of collective assets and command of the destiny of society through individualized electoral processes, based on the tenet that a society can be represented fairly by the aggregate of its individuals and the arithmetic sum of their votes.
Capitalism and liberal democracy are not universal systems, but were born as the historical outcome of a specific internal socio-economic process in the West that marked the rise of individualism. Capitalism could not use a tribe knocking at the front gate for work, but needed detribalized detached solitary workers, one at a time. Its sibling, liberal democracy, on its guard against social responses and collective action that tend to be subversive to oligarchy and elite, installed the one-person-one-vote system in secret ballots that aborted threatening social forces as the prime agents of change and development. For that purpose, tribe, community, social belonging, social cohesion, solidarity, culture and kin were perceived as the antithesis of freedom, and replaced by scattered desocialised competing individuals. People bonded by solidarity in culture and structure disintegrated into atomized individuals. The next step was to mechanically aggregate all into the electorate and the free labor force, in a marriage of convenience of capital and liberalism. The tenet that free market or privatization is a requirement for democracy is a crude invention. There is no free access to the free market.[4] That is what Paul Baran pointed to, more than four decades ago: “Thus the campaign for the preservation of capitalism is advertised today more energetically than ever as a crusade for democracy and freedom.”[5]
In the course of the twentieth century, liberal democracy based on atomistic individualism and claiming universal validity, was transferred with dramatic complications to countries based on communal life in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. The result is an anthology of social and political instability, violence, ethnic unrest and civil war that severely undermined the prospects for development and progress. Under the banner of democracy, individual-based majority rule typically combined elite affluence with widespread misery, asphyxiating any real option for development and progress.This fusion of universal political freedom with structural social injustice produced a stable symbiosis of equality in the political and juridical realm, with structural inequality in most other fields of social existence. The historical record of liberal democracy abundantly maps the appropriation of resources of the state for partisan, particularistic or sectarian use, with systemic corruption, clientelism, minority oppression and majority marginalization, among its prominent flaws. The consistently bad record and failure of liberal democracy to offer a viable political system in the vast majority of the countries of the globe and the unacceptably high social cost it demanded and still has in store for humanity, poses an urgent challenge to governance and politics at a global scale, in the twenty first century.
Compared to medieval absolutism, liberal democracy is a step forward in the wrong direction, if judged against the ancient Chinese thought of Meng-Tzu that the people come first, the country second, and the king third.[6] Contemporary politics inverted the order: the ruler first, the country second and the people third.
This brings us to two basic avenues open to achieve power and rule in a polity with a say of the people. The choice is between delegation and representation. Delegation is the political process of people abdicating their power, rights and influence by investing a limited number of persons with the authority to act with full autonomy, to their own discretion, on behalf of all. Representation is the political process where people claim active use of power, rights and influence to secure their own interests and development, by directly nourishing and controlling the voices that speak and act in their name. The elaborate these alternatives of delegation and representation we should first elaborate the paradigm that forms its theoretical base.
2. Development/envelopment paradigm
All development theories of the last fifty years have failed, without exception. Worldwide, ambitious development initiatives derailed into deep crisis, casting the majority of humanity, living in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, in deep trouble and grave sorrow for the future. These failures, both in theory and in praxis, had one indisputable historical cause.
The empire that does not claim bringing civilization has yet to be born. By deduction, the other is the barbarian. What was labeled as ‘development’ was, in reality, its very opposite, ‘envelopment’, a paternalist process to incorporate the other, to overwhelm, to enclose and wrap up by envelopment, as done with an envelope. Annexation, insertion and incorporation into an alien genealogy and teleology were the goal, rather than support of inner forces to grow and to flourish from within the society. In the false development/underdevelopment dichotomy, the transfer and mimicry of devices from abroad were taken as the prime agents of progress, in an imperial attempt of cloning oneself into other societies, instead of mobilizing the inner forces of a community. The correct definition of development is the mobilization of the own potentialities and social forces in a project of self-realization, in interactive response to nature, habitat, resources, culture and history for the realization of a project of one’s own.[7] Development is a process from within that one can trigger, support and sustain, but never donate by transfer, not even as a generous gift. This unmasking of the false development discourse led to a new promising explanatory model, the development/envelopment paradigm, with development as self-realization and its negation, envelopment, as the incorporation of subdued people in a project that is alien to their internal social dynamism.[8]
By merging the development/envelopment paradigm with the social-reality based extradisciplinary method, a powerful practical tool becomes available to formulate a democratic alternative in the realm of politics. The extradisciplinary approach[9] eliminates the dichotomy between theory and praxis by putting an end to the inverted logic of current social sciences that the anatomy of academia determines the anatomy of society. This reality-based de-academisation of social science, that rejects autonomous social science disciplines, overcomes the gulf between theory and practice inherent in the academic tradition. Complex social reality and history demand specializations for purposes of study rather than autonomous disciplines derived from academia, but always with the compelling requirement to put bits together before making any final statement. Social reality, rather than fragmentation in disciplines, becomes both the starting place and the end of the scientific enterprise in the extradisciplinary approach.[10]